Magic Mirror

PhotoFilm: Sampling the Archives

Sarah Pucill

UK

2013

75min

English

Magic Mirror is the first part of a diptych of films re-enacting photographs by the Surrealist artist Claude Cahun (1894-1954) as tableaux vivants, and which are accompanied by spoken text from Cahun’s writing. Out of these intermedial interactions, media, authorship, and the question of when interpretation becomes a creative act, are made uncertain.

Projections:

11.17. Friday 20:30

French Institute

Editor:

Sarah Pucill

Camera:

Sarah Pucill

Sound:

Konrad Welz

Fernando Calleja Lopez

Music:

Jon Opstad

Distribution info:

Lux London, UK

Director Bio:

Sarah Pucill has been making 16mm short films since completing her MA at the Slade School of Art in 1990. Her publicly-funded films have screened worldwide in galleries, and have won awards at international festivals. Her first feature-length film in black and white, Magic Mirror (2013), premiered at Tate Modern, toured internationally with LUX and was exhibited with photographs from the film at The Nunnery Gallery 2015. Her sequel to Magic Mirror, Confessions to the Mirror (2016), also shot on 16mm, premiered at London Film Festival and has since screened at international film festivals and museum galleries including the Alchemy Film Festival, Creteil Film Festival, National Portrait Gallery, and White Cube Gallery London. She has a doctorate and is Reader at University of Westminster. A forthcoming chapter on her recent films on Cahun will be published by Palgrave Macmillian, edited by V. Smith and N. Hamlin next year. Her work is collected and distributed through leading international distributors including LUX, The British Film Institute (BFI), and Light Cone Paris.